Revolutionizing the Tech Workforce
We are pleased to announce that our project, “Revolutionizing the Tech Workforce,” has been awarded the Cal Poly Strategic Research Initiative Award, a $150,000 grant which we will share with the Cybersecurity Institute. We aim to address the urgent need to revolutionize the way we train tech workers.
Public outcry about ethical issues in the tech industry and its products -- a 'techlash' moving through the country and across campuses-- is catching up with critical academic work that calls attention to sexism, racism and geographical bias in the industry, evaporating privacy, bias in algorithms that drive our economy and justice system, and business models leading to isolation, individualism, and tribalism (2). At the same time, and in part in response to this techlash, tech companies in California and beyond are seeking to hire thousands of workers in a newly emerging professional field we have identified, and are calling ethical technology.
We aim to make Cal Poly a national leader in research and training in ethical technology, eventually operating through a novel archetype of a cross-college professional school and institute that offers new models of graduate and undergraduate degrees and spurs similar institutional innovations across California and the nation.
Piloting Ethical Technology Research Through Service Based Learning
In 2020, Dr. Donig was awarded the Center for Expressive Technology’s Seed Grant to pilot a service-based learning approach, comlementing her Currently, Dr. “Technically Human” course on ethical and humane technology. The project, in partnership with the Cal Poly DxHub aims to help the next generation of humanists and technologists understand the ethics of technology in order to apply this knowledge to practice. The award will provide paid internships for students who will facilitate research practices and launch the program.
Paid internships for students ensures that opportunities to intern with industry partners are equal opportunity for students interested in ethical technology education and practice, and will help us build on the university’s new commitment to building an interdisciplinary ethical technology dimension to Cal Poly’s scholarship and undergraduate education.
Training the Next Generation of
Technologists
To address the future of tech, we must create a new type of enquiry, situated between critical scholarship and corporate demand, and we must educate the next generation of tech workers to help facilitate societal shift towards what we call ethical technology: innovation equitable in both process and outcome.
Ethical Tech @ Cal Poly
Cal Poly is uniquely positioned to meet this challenge. We propose a program of research, outreach, and institutional program building that will help us understand the structural, practical, and educational landscapes necessary to support the development of ethical technology products and practices. Our initiative boldly aims to cross disciplinary, epistemic, and sectoral boundaries to make Cal Poly the center of this new field and train the next generation of ethical technologists. With our existing expertise in philosophy of technology, science technology & society (STS), computer science, and public policy, our faculty understand the intersections of ethical issues and new technologies, and we approach these pressing challenges from multiple disciplines. Our approach seeks to integrate multidisciplinary perspectives to create new research agendas that can address gaps in our knowledge, guide professional practice, and develop novel educational programs to effectively and affordably teach the future technology workforce.
Objectives.
We aim to make Cal Poly a national leader in research and training in ethical technology, eventually operating through a novel archetype of a cross-college professional school and institute that offers new models of graduate and undergraduate degrees and spurs similar institutional innovations across California and the nation. In order to accomplish this objective, we have three aims that map onto three distinct landscapes of ethical technology:
1. Understand the Structural Landscape: Examine the dynamics and biases in hiring and training and new types of organizations and decision making connected to ethics and technology, and how key actors driving changes conceive and operationalize ethical issues.
2. Address the Practice Landscape: Explore how ethical approaches become embedded in the everyday processes of creating technologies and bringing them to market.
3. Reshape the Educational Landscape: Establish new arrangements inside universities and novel pedagogies that enable training and degree programs on ethical technologies and build the new school and institute.
Methods & Approach.
Our approach involves simultaneously conducting pilot projects, forming external alliances, and building internal coalitions in Year 1 of this project:
1. Pilot Project: We will conduct pilot projects to provide baseline data for grant applications. These pilot projects will include:
a. Using machine learning to study how job ads related to ethics and technology have evolved in the tech, public, and non-profit sectors; developing fictitious resumes using the results of this analysis and enlisting these resumes in trial job searches, identifying links between demand and key skills, alongside gender/racial biases.
b. Interviewing and surveying hiring managers, technical managers, coders, non-profit and policy leaders in the tech space to understand their perceptions of ethical issues, alongside how ethical issues arise in their work; identifying knowledge and skills deficits.
c. Designing quasi-experimental and participant observation methods based on pilot multidisciplinary classes and service learning to study the interaction of tech design and ethics in practice, following the Cal Poly principle, Learn by Doing.
2. External Alliances: Form partnerships and alliances with industry, non-profits, academic institutions and scholars, and public sector groups to ensure that Cal Poly will become the intellectual hub of research and teaching models of ethical technology. Partners will be part of a speaker series and sympiosia (see outcomes below). Partners will also play key roles in designing and carrying out research.
3. Internal Coalition Building: Identify key campus interlocutors hold a bi-quarterly task force to discuss updates on research and grant applications and publications, and strategize about how to build on programs that blend disciplines across the humanities, social sciences, and technological disciplines.
Expected Outcomes.
This project will result in pilot service-based learning courses developed for graduating seniors interested in ethical technology, following the Learn by Doing model. We will develop relationships with ethical technology organizations and companies willing to partner with students. This project will establish student internships at these organizations and companies that will allow them to learn about and contribute to ethical technology work. We will identify key educational background contexts, theories, and pedagogy for teaching this class, as well as vet syllabus content for a class in this context. Key products include:
1. Speaker Series and First Annual Cal Poly Ethical Symposium to identify key stakeholders, build alliances and relationships, and solidify relationships with collaborators within and outside Cal Poly. These events will serve to:
a. Promote Cal Poly’s visibility in the field as the center of this field.
b. Establish a context and a community for knowledge sharing and informational exchange, partnerships, collaborations, and create a forum for continued ideation, cutting-edge research, and commitment to the vision of ethical technology across a diversity of disciplines, industries, and contexts within the field of ethical technology.
2. Conference participation and presentation at major relevant summits, including the Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies and The Annual Unintended Consequences of Technology Conference in order to:
a. Provide opportunities for members of the team to produce and present new data.
b. Create opportunities for this team to identify others doing work in critical areas.
c. Increase Cal Poly’s visibility in the field by ensuring its presence and contribution across a variety of arenas.
3. An edited manuscript of essays on interdisciplinary ethical technology,
Contribution to Growth
and Impact of Research
and Scholarship
This project will place Cal Poly at the center of growing conversations around technology through building a new model for ethical technology as a research field and as an institutional program of education.
Creating the first graduate program of study and pedagogical model committed to this field will make Cal Poly the standard-bearer of accreditation, and a model for other institutions building the emerging field, its practices, and its infrastructure. The future of this industry will develop on the terms established by our campus. Cal Poly will be the central hub for conversations about ethical technology, attracting students and researchers interested in ethical technology and increasing Cal Poly’s visibility in both academia and industry as the epicenter of this dynamic new field.